Two who love each other (inthe original Danish “to som elsker hin anden”, Tove Ditlevsen, 1960)
This Danish novel about adultery is constructed as a love triangle, whose chapters alternate between the wife Inga, the husband Torben, and his 19-year old lover Eva. I get the feeling that the writer Tove Ditlevsen has experienced all three of these situations in her real life and is therefore good at describing the feelings of each of the characters very well. Sometimes it really shows that this is written almost 60 years ago, with depictions of male behavoir that wouldn’t be accepted after third wave feminism, I guess. Interesting to read a writer that has been so talked about, although I wasn’t thrilled to learn that she has been compared to Kerstin Thorvall. What is an American equivalent to Tove Ditlevsen?
I like the poetic style it is written in, with lots of beautiful similes and thoughts woven into the text. Ditlevsen started as a poet, after all. I was a bit wary of her writing before, because I got the sense that she was the type of writer who liked to get drunk and then write about all the mistakes that are the results of her debauchery, a genre that I’m not really all that interested in. Life writing – is that a kind of nomer designed to belittle its referent?
Kinship of all Species 
Never heard of the author before but I like the idea of alternating chapters. Will search for this.
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Yes, Ditlevsen is worth seeking out! Thank you for your comment. Interesting bit of trivia: the structure of alternating chapters in a relationship is also present in the 1991 American film “he said, she said” starring aningar other Kevin Bacon. Recently I found out that this approach was pioneered by French filmmaker André Cayatte with his 1964 diptych “la Vie conjugale”
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